Ethan White

As I [announced on
Twitter](https://twitter.com/ethanwhite/status/230691850321797120) about
a week ago, I am now making all of my grant proposals open access. To
start with I'm doing this for all of my sole-PI proposals, because I
don't have to convince my collaborators to participate in this rather
aggressively open style of science. At the moment this includes three
funded proposals: my [NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship
proposal](http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.93938), an associated
[Research Starter Grant
proposal](http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.93939), and my [NSF
CAREER award](http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.93937).

So, why am I doing this, especially with the CAREER award that still has
several years left on it and some cool ideas that we haven't worked on
yet. I'm doing it for a few reasons. First, I think that openness is
inherently good for science. While there may be benefits for me in
keeping my ideas secret until they are published, this certainly doesn't
benefit science more broadly. By sharing our proposals the cutting edge
of scientific thought will no longer be hidden from view for several
years and that will allow us to make more rapid progress. Second, I
think having examples of grants available to young scientists has the
potential to help them learn how to write good proposals (and other
folks [seem](https://twitter.com/sennoma/status/230726486586441731)
[to](https://twitter.com/sennoma/status/230739990227845121)
[agree](https://twitter.com/ATredennick/status/231033017555095552)) and
therefore decrease the importance of grantsmanship relative to cool
science in the awarding of limited funds. Finally, I just think that
folks deserve to be able to see what their tax dollars are paying for,
and to be able to compare what I've said I will do to what I actually
accomplish. I've been influenced in my thinking about this by posts by
several of the big open science folks out there including [Titus
Brown](http://ivory.idyll.org/blog/grants-posted.html), [Heather
Piwowar](http://total-impact.tumblr.com/post/18535014681/sloan-foundation-grant-submitted),
and [Rod
Page](http://iphylo.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/would-you-give-me-grant-experiment-in.html).

To make my grants open access I chose to use
[figshare](http://figshare.com/) for several reasons.

1.  Credit. Figshare assigns a
    [DOI](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_object_identifier) to all
    of its public objects, which means that you can easily cite them in
    scientific papers. If someone gets an idea out of one of my
    proposals and works on it before I do, this let's them acknowledge
    that fact. Stats are also available for views, shares, and (soon)
    citations, making it easier to track the impact of your larger
    corpus of research outputs.
2.  Open Access. All public written material is licensed under
    [CC-BY](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) (basically just
    cite the original work) allowing folks to do cool things without
    asking.
3.  Permanence. I can't just change my mind and delete the proposal and
    I also expect that figshare will be around for a long time.
4.  Version control. For proposals that are not funded, revised, not
    funded, revised, etc. figshare allows me to post multiple versions
    of the proposal while maintaining the previous versions for
    posterity/citation.

During this process I've come across several other folks doing similar
things and even [inspired others to post their
proposals](https://twitter.com/recology_/status/232909923086913536), so
I'm in the process of compiling a list of all of the publicly available
biology proposals that I'm aware of and will post a list with links
soon. It's my hope that this will serve as a valuable resource for young
and old researchers alike and will help to lead the way forward to a
more open scientific dialogue.


As I announced on Twitter about a week ago, I am now making all of my grant proposals open access. To start with I’m doing this for all of my sole-PI proposals, because I don’t have to convince my collaborators to participate in this rather aggressively open style of science. At the moment this includes three funded proposals: my NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship proposal, an associated Research Starter Grant proposal, and my NSF CAREER award.

Rogue Scholar Posts

On making my grant proposals open access